A Prince Without a Kingdom (36 page)

“Nobody misses me anymore.”

“Just your mother —”

“Be quiet.”

George was staring at a candle as the boat swayed.

“You have also come to ascertain whether I’ve told anybody,” said the plantation manager, wetting his lips in the tea for the first time. “This tea is Ottoman,” he declared.

“Yes.”

“I haven’t breathed a word,” continued Mr. Lao. “I haven’t spoken about it to anyone. I’m always on my guard. My tea merchant often repeats a proverb from his home village: Tell your secret to a friend, but your friend also has a friend.”

Weeping Willow nodded. The wick of a candle spluttered as it drowned in wax.

“Perhaps I’ll go to see my mother,” he said.

“Promise me.”

George had learned that his mother hadn’t stayed until the end of his funeral service. She had left the cathedral, distraught. After his departure from the palace at Abbas Tuman, Weeping Willow had guessed that nobody would mention the fact that his corpse had never been found. There were enough curses hanging over his family already. George Alexandrovich was dead. That was enough. A coffin was buried containing no body, but filled with books.

“Look at me, for example. I left my country,” explained the man, “without ever seeing my mother again.”

Weeping Willow glanced at Mr. Lao, who was smiling. Only the light trade winds rippling the surface of his cup of tea betrayed his emotions.

“And then my mother died,” said Lao.

Somebody pushed open the glass door that gave onto the deck.

“I said nobody was to enter!” growled George.

The sailor took a step backward.

“Forgive me.”

“Go outside.”

“We’ve netted something out the back,” declared the sailor, looking pale.

“I told you to go outside.”

“I —”

“Out!”

Defying his master, the sailor dared to go over to him and whisper in his ear. George was taken aback. The red blanket slid off his shoulders.

The crew on the boat was from Cyprus. In every sea of the region, as far back as antiquity, fishermen had harbored a secret dream of one day catching a fantastic creature in their nets. And the sailor had just uttered the magic word in Greek: Leucosia, meaning fair maiden, and the name of one of the three sirens.

George stood up. Perhaps he too had been looking for a fairy or a siren during his fifteen-year odyssey? He had searched all the gulfs and rocks of the Mediterranean as far as Gibraltar. But there was still no woman by his side.

He went out on deck and made his way toward the aft of the boat. The sailors were huddled near the tiller, with two lanterns flickering above them. They had formed a circle around somebody whose guilty demeanor, clenched fists, and sopping-wet hair and skirt were more reminiscent of a drowned cat than a mermaid. She hid beneath her hair. Nobody dared approach her.

George wasn’t sure whether to cover her in his blanket. He leaned gently over and noticed that the mermaid had two bare feet where a tail should have been.

Mr. Lao had followed George outside. He parted the sailors and surveyed the scene, standing next to the boat’s Russian owner.

“Stella?” he called out.

A face streaming with water appeared between the locks of hair. Two eyes found those of Weeping Willow. She had changed a great deal since the man with tuberculosis and the little girl from Chakva had first met.

“What are you doing here, Stella?” asked Mr. Lao.

But there was no reply.

Despite the threat of war, the boat remained in the bay for ten days. And when it sailed off, one cold morning, there were many tears shed on the beach. Stella was going away with Weeping Willow. Their marriage had taken place at night. The priest had placed the Orthodox wedding crowns on the heads of the bride and groom, and George had flinched at the weight on his head.

At dawn, on the shore, Stella’s mother had kissed her eldest daughter good-bye, as Mr. Lao held a black umbrella over them and the sand was whipped up.
Little Rhea stayed hidden in the bamboo forest. She had climbed to the top of a thatched roof, in among the leaves and the wind, from where she watched the gathering on the beach as if it were a funeral. Stella forgot to seek her out and kiss her.

George had the front of the boat emblazoned with a gold star, after his wife’s name. The sails swelled. They promised they’d be back, but the following summer the straits leading to the Black Sea were closed off with a sinister din. War broke out across the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus.

The boat and its new star never returned to Chakva.

That said, one day, even though armored soldiers roamed the region, the boat dropped anchor off the shores of Constantinople. George had entrusted the care of Stella to his crew. It was 1915 and the baby she was expecting might arrive at any moment. He promised to return before the baby was born. For the first time, Weeping Willow went back to Saint Petersburg.

He saw his mother on a bridge, behind the Anichkov Palace. He kept the promise he had made to Mr. Lao. It only lasted for a moment.

He had arranged a meeting with her in a letter on which was reproduced, in freehand, the motif of his blue handkerchief, to prove that it was him. It bore the refrain of his youth:
Combien de royaumes nous ignorent.
And, embroidered in gold thread, the signature he had created for himself, when he was fifteen years old, by carving it into a tree. The word
Romanov,
the name of his dynasty, was written in the Latin alphabet. But the
V
had been doubled, and was separate from the other letters, one line below.

W,
as in Weeping Willow.

In the letter to his mother, George told her about what had happened to him, about being cured and his new life.
Dear Mother, I am alive. I know that you haven’t forgotten me.
If she wanted to see him, to be sure that it really was him, all she had to do was drive past at five o’clock. He would be beneath the sculpted horses on the bridge. She mustn’t stop.

He also announced that he was going to have a child.

Standing in the rain, George heard the sound of horses’ hooves first. Then he saw the carriage pass by with its misted-up windows.

Stopping off in Moscow, he found Mademoiselle in a railway station. He noticed her red eyes, her suitcase, her upright figure, and he heard her French accent. He followed her discreetly as far as the post office and offered her a job. He was looking for a nurse for his child. He was sure that it would be a little girl.

But it was a prince. Vango. A prince without a kingdom.

To begin with, George’s mother kept safe the letter he had written her. But when the revolution broke out in Russia two years later, in 1917, it was found in one of the deserted palaces.

In the boat, sitting on the carpet-covered deck and listening to Stella singing, Weeping Willow had carefully used his knife to pull out the golden thread on the second
V.
Only one remained now:
V
for Vango, his son.

It was ten o’clock in the evening, and Mademoiselle was pouring pitchers of hot water into a copper bath. Vango lived in his mother’s arms. For several days now, the boat had been far from the war. Weeping Willow folded the square of blue silk. He had no idea that one day the signature on this handkerchief would identify his son, delivering him into the hands of his enemies.

As they spotted the first lighthouse of Crete, a gust of wind was all it would have taken to blow the handkerchief out of Weeping Willow’s hands, drowning it in the sea, and changing Vango’s destiny forever.

The five pages written by Mademoiselle to Vango, but which had never reached him, recounted much more and in a style that was simple yet powerful. They also mentioned the treasure, which the tsar’s mother had stored for safekeeping in Weeping Willow’s boat when the great revolution had begun. Mademoiselle described the little fishing port where one night they loaded on board a padlocked barrel with the seal of the tsars.

Doctor Basilio read and reread these pages for many years. When he had first opened the letter, a long time ago, he had bought a Russian dictionary that he left in Mademoiselle’s deserted house in Pollara, in order to check how some of the words had been translated by the prisoner of Lipari.

There was even a short paragraph about Mademoiselle’s youth in Paris, and it contained a former address, which was enough to make Basilio dream. It was the address of the place where she had worked before setting off for Russia in 1914. When would Vango come to collect Mademoiselle’s letter, which filled in the blanks of his life?

For Basilio, many of the sentences addressed to Vango remained incomprehensible and even poetic sounding.

These words surely meant nothing, even if the Aeolian Islands did form the shape of the letter
V
over the sea. The translator must have made a mistake. But Basilio liked this poem, which he kept just for himself.

Paris, December 20, 1942

It was pitch-black at nine o’clock in the morning. For two years now, the clocks in Paris had been moved forward to Berlin time.

Two men were walking up the Champs-Élysées. The first was called Augustin Avignon. He wore a black woolen scarf and a hat pulled down over his head to protect his ears from the biting cold. He was followed by a young man, who carried a heavy briefcase in both arms. Avignon was issuing a barrage of short sharp orders, as if to hear his junior respond as frequently as possible.

“Yes, Superintendent.”

Avignon had been superintendent for nine months, and he still hadn’t gotten used to it.

“His name’s Max Grund?”

“Yes, Superintendent.”

“Find out what grade he is for me.”

“Yes, Superintendent.”

“I’ve only ever addressed him as
offizier.
I must look like a fool.”

“Yes, Superintendent.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry, Superintendent. The Germans are establishing new offices every day. It’s hard to keep up.”

The city was dark. The street lamps along the avenue were off. They came across some men pushing a cart full of wood.

“Is it a little farther up?”

“Another hundred meters, Superintendent.”

“I’m going to give them a piece of my mind, I can tell you. The sparks will fly.”

“I understand, Superintendent.”

“So, are you taking any vacation, Mouchet?”

“Just for Christmas.”

“To do what?”

“My wife wants to visit her family in Nice.”

“And when does this vacation of yours start, Mouchet?”